Tim Grobaty: Forest creature dreams veer too close to reality

THE SMELL OF THE WILD: It's never good news when we dream about forest creatures.

People who have made it their life's work to study our canon will recall that the last time we had a dream about a forest creature the dream was about a possum on our head and we woke up with a possum on our head.

Early Tuesday morning, a bit after the bars closed, we had a dream about what appeared to have been a squirrel. A rather unremarkable squirrel (discounting the fact that it could talk) that was tawny in color.

We chatted amiably for a while and then we broached the subject of why it smelled incredibly, stiflingly bad. It was making us sick, was how bad the squirrel smelled.

The squirrel stood on its hind legs and showed us a chest that was black fur with a white stripe down its center. Turned out it was a reversible squirrel/skunk - see, this is why people hate it when you tell them your dreams; they're invariably stupid.

Then, we woke up, barely able to breath the real-life skunk smell that was hurricaning through the open window next to our head.

It was palpably oily and unbearably malodorous. We've had a whiff or two of tear gas in our rambunctious youth in the 1970s when cheerful teens would riot over anything resembling horrible social injustice, such as lifeguards confiscating a beer from a bum on the beach.

We would use tear gas for soothing Visine against a vicious skunk attack.

And this skunk was close. It might've been on our head.

We weren't meant to live like this, under the constant assault of wildlife. Coyotes prancing in our front yard, squirrels and rats devouring our crop of avocados and chewing up Internet access and dishwasher hoses, mice getting into our little chocolate bottles of liquor and reeling around drunk all night, raccoons getting the skunks all riled up and then pointing them at our head in our sleep, possums behaving inappropriately. It's no better than being a hobo.

"Don't you ever clean up your house?" asked our personal writing coach who lives in a luxury high-rise condominium on the exclusive Western Slope on Signal Hill. She doesn't even get a housefly in her condo, never mind North American marsupials.

It was just a lucky guess. But even people who do clean their house in our part of town have wildlife problems. It's what happens when hardy and intrepid pioneers like us get fed up with civilization and move out into little shacks out in the woods of East Long Beach with nothing but bear traps and muskets to keep the terrors of nature at bay.

TURNING TO YACHTING: You laugh now, looking at us in our house that's so overrun with animals it looks like it's covered in mink, but we used to be a yacht club commodore.

It's true, as you point out, that the clubhouse was in a trailer park and all the craft in the club were inflatable rafts equipped with half-horsepower motors (don't laugh; half a horse can pull a rubber raft at a good clip), the point is, we were a yacht club commodore. Why do you have to punch holes into every one of our life's triumphs?

We've been out of the yachting game for more than 20 years now, though, which explains why we have neglected to mention, amid our other seasonal parade trumpetings, the 30th annual Long Beach Christmas Boat Parade, the Parade of 1,000 Lights, which cruises along the local shoreline starting at 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 8 in the downtown marinas - the Shoreline Marina and the Rainbow Harbor locations.

The theme this year is "Tropical Holidays," which, if you have a yacht, you're basically there.

The parade begins outside Shoreline Marina, circles toward Island White, through Shoreline Marina and on into Rainbow Harbor past Parkers' Lighthouse then out of the Rainbow Harbor passing the Queen Mary. Best viewing from land is in Shoreline Village, Rainbow Harbor and the Queen Mary.

Boaters can enter the parade for just $10 if they register by Sunday. After that, it's $15. For an entry form, call 562-435-4093, or send an email to syclb@hotmail.com.